The Scent of Blue Roses
by shirogane777
Summary: Rivalshipping written for the Yugioh Fanfiction Contest. Kaiba discovers that life at 25 is not what he expected.


Pale light filtered through the reinforced glass of the office's bay windows. It was near dawn, and, in an unusual move for him, Seto Kaiba was not working. His gaze rested steadily on the vase of flowers that had been delivered the previous night.

They were... tasteful... he supposed. The vase was clear, a royal blue ribbon tied around it, and the dozen roses inside were lavender. Out of reflex, he counted them.

Eleven. Eleven weird purple roses. Something about them stirred his analytic mind. He'd never been one for frivolity but he was sure that eleven roses meant something. Or perhaps the florist had simply forgotten one. Still...

He shifted back in his chair, half contemplating asking his secretary to throw them out. Aiko had brought them in earlier, a rare smile on her features as she'd gingerly set them on the desk. "These are Suntory roses," she'd said. "I've always wanted to see them in person." It was perhaps the most personal information she'd volunteered in her five years of service.

Who, he thought, would bother sending him flowers? Gifts from fans were strictly supervised and sent to a separate location for security processing. So it must be someone with influence. Perhaps a business associate? He was in talks with Industrial Illusions at the moment. Pegasus seemed like someone who might send flowers anonymously, perhaps to mock him. But Pegasus had long ago stepped down from his position as CEO. Ryuiji Otogi had stepped in as his protege, but Otogi hardly seemed like the kind of man to send things anonymously.

Kaiba felt the beginnings of a migraine prickling at his skull. This was stupid. He was just trying to stave off the stress of his inevitable confrontation with his board of directors by occupying himself with this ridiculous mystery.

Perhaps… perhaps he really did need a vacation. In just two short hours he would be presenting his newest idea to his board of directors, and he had the feeling that while amusement parks were one thing, a private dueling school was an entirely different matter for a profit-driven bunch of old men. It was not going to go over well.

As he'd aged, he'd found he more and more lacked the energy and anger of his youth. Things that had infuriated him now merely annoyed him, and somehow, people found him less intimidating at 25 than they had at 19.

He had, to put it simply, matured.

But not enough to stop himself from calling Aiko in to investigate. "I need you to find out who sent these," he said once she was standing before him. "Hire a detective if you must."

"Of course, sir," she said. "They must be someone who knows you well. " Her nonchalant comment took him off guard.

"Why do you say that?"

"They're blue roses, sir. They symbolize the unattainable in flower language."

He stared at her. "They look purple," he said.

"Roses naturally lack the gene that produces delphinidin, the blue pigment found in pansies, so they had to be genetically engineered to express blue via gene splicing. It's proven difficult to suppress other pigment's being expressed however, resulting in a blue-red rose. Which is to say, purple."

As she spoke, Aiko's face grew more and more red. "I-I'm sorry. I just… I get a bit caught up when I'm talking about flowers. Please excuse my rambling."

Kaiba merely raised an eyebrow at her before lowering his eyes to study the bouquet once more. "Interesting," he said at last. "Do numbers of flowers mean anything? Let's say… 11 flowers?"

"Well," Aiko said, losing a bit of her stammer. "For roses, 11 would mean, 'You are deeply loved.' So 11 blue roses might mean, 'I love you dearly, though you are unattainable to me.'" At the realization, she flushed again.

"So this is a kind of love letter?"

"They could just be flowers, sir. I didn't mean to bore you with my useless knowledge."

"No. Not at all. This has proven quite informative." Kaiba paused. "Weren't you meant to be investigating the sender?"

"Yes, sir. I'll get on that right away." Aiko turned quickly and scurried out of the room.

Kaiba mused on this new information. Could Aiko have sent these? No, he decided. She was too discrete for this sort of thing. He wasn't particularly attuned to the feelings of others, but analyzing her past behavior seemed to suggest her not being in love with him. At least, he hoped she wasn't in love with him. He'd hate to have to fire a valuable assistant. Besides, she'd seemed surprised at his question about the number of flowers.

He sighed in relief. 55 minutes until his meeting. Perhaps he'd make the most of the time and take a nap.

* * *

There was a blue rose in his lapel. Kaiba saw it from across the room.

"Yo! Kaiba!" said a voice behind him and someone clapped him heartily on the back, causing champagne to spill all over Kaiba's custom Prada dress shoes. He turned angrily towards Ryuiji Otogi.

"Excuse me? The hell do you mean by that?" Kaiba couldn't tell if he was madder about being spoken to without an honorific, the totally unwarranted bodily contact, or the fact that now that he looked, he couldn't see anyone wearing a blue rose at all. Otogi removed his lavish Gate Guardian mask.

"C'mon, where's your sense of fun? I planned a Duel Monsters-themed masquerade ball to celebrate our new partnership and you wear this?" He gestured towards Kaiba's immaculately tailored suit. "How can you own the largest toy company in the world and be so… boring?"

God, Kaiba thought to himself. Otogi was growing more like Pegasus every year. Kaiba had, in fact, picked out a costume, ordered it custom-made for today. Yet, when faced with putting it on, he'd been confronted with his own unexpected self-consciousness. A younger him wouldn't have balked at something so extravagant but more and more he found himself reluctant to draw attention to himself. And so he'd left the Blue Eyes costume crumpled and sad on his nightstand.

"I don't have the same luxuries of time that you have, Otogi," Kaiba said. He snuck a glance at his shoes. Ugh. Ruined probably. He'd send that bill to Industrial Illusions in the morning.

Kaiba attended industry parties out of necessity. It was a good way of scoping out potential weaknesses in his competitors and forming useful alliances. Unfortunately a lot of industry professionals were also the losers he'd gone to high school with. How the hell had Domino High School yielded such a huge number of gamers? It was honestly a huge mystery, and he continued to suffer from the consequences of it. Not two feet away from him was Katsuya Jounouchi, now a fairly renowned duelist in his own right. He even had a god-damned action figure modeled after him! Jounouchi wasn't wearing a mask, but he did have on a Flame Swordsman costume that looked as though he'd made it the night before with duct tape and old cardboard boxes.

Kaiba rolled his eyes and attempted to sneak away before he was forced to interact with any more of his old high school classmates. Across the room Mokuba was talking animatedly to a group of people, almost regal as a Magician of Black Chaos. Mokuba had taken over PR once he turned 16 and was turning out to be quite as skilled with social media as he himself had been with technology. It seemed like he'd finally found his niche in Kaiba Corporation and Kaiba couldn't be more proud.

And yet somehow he couldn't bear to watch the scene much longer. He turned and drifted through the crowd like a jellyfish, letting the current of the partygoers drive him into a corner of the room. Along the journey he'd acquired a new glass of champagne and he sat, sipping at it, brainstorming product ideas on his phone.

He'd always rather fancied himself as a better and more handsome Steve Jobs, but here he was, unable to join the crowd, unable to leave. Steve Jobs would never have sat in the corner on his phone.

Someone tapped him gently on the shoulder and he nearly spilled his champagne again. A person in a Kuriboh mask paired with a suit and tie stood before him.

"What?" he snapped. The Kuriboh waved happily at him and then sat in the chair next to his. "I don't recall giving you permission to sit there." The man(?) in the Kuriboh mask merely shrugged and Kaiba felt his old teenage fury boiling up inside of him.

It was at this precise moment that he noticed the flower in the man's lapel.

"Blue," he breathed, staring fixedly at it before looking up. "Those flowers are really rare, aren't they?"

The Kuriboh nodded.

"Someone sent me some recently."

The Kuriboh nodded again.

"Was it you?"

It was a long moment before the Kuriboh nodded again, slowly. Kaiba wanted to scream in triumph, but he remembered what Aiko had said. This was going to be very, very uncomfortable unless Kaiba handled it well.

"Did you have a reason for that? Did they… signify something?" Kaiba asked.

The Kuriboh appeared to contemplate the answer, looking off into space before turning to him and nodding again.

"What?"

From behind the mask came the muffled voice of a young man. Kaiba recognized it instantly.

"Because," said Yugi. "Because I thought… I thought you might like them."

Kaiba could feel his pulse pounding against his fingertips. Right. Yugi was making fun of him. He had to be. The number of roses didn't mean anything. He'd had to have taken one from the bouquet when he sent them. For fun. Yugi did things for fun. Fun was what Yugi was all about.

Kaiba's stomach twisted inside of him. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, feeling as though he was about to be sick.

"Um… Are you alright?"

With great effort, he swallowed the bile rising in his throat. "I'm fine," Kaiba said. "That's just like you. What a meaningless gesture." He rose to his feet and Yugi stood with him.

"I'm going out to get some air," Kaiba announced to no one in particular, and all but ran out of the room.

* * *

My god, thought Kaiba to himself. I'm in a Jane Austen novel. This was obviously the gothic parody part, he thought, noting what looked like slime on the walls. He'd taken a wrong turn after fleeing the party and he really hadn't realized how labyrinthine Industrial Illusion's building was. Was this some sort of dungeon?

Obviously this had to be some sort of virtual reality simulation, he thought glancing nervously down what appeared to be a dank stone passage. Industrial Illusions had been trying to compete with KaibaCorp's holographic technology for a while now. This has to be a testing ground, he told himself.

Normally his excellent spatial memory would be kicking in by now, but he could swear the room shifted after he left it. He couldn't even use his cellphone gps because the reception was so bad.

Kaiba glanced again at the slime-covered walls, and, swallowing his disdain, reached out to touch them. As he had suspected the wall was smooth and painted, like your ordinary office building and not rough like the hewn stone he could see. Dammit. Maybe this was their security system and he'd accidentally triggered it. All he needed now was for Otogi to sneak up on him and start accusing him of violating their contract and his stocks would plummet.

Kaiba sighed, leaning his head against the wall. This was the worst. This was the absolute worst. Everything was confusing and uncomfortable, not at all the way he'd expected adulthood to be. The champagne sloshed around his stomach, and he thought of Yugi's stupid face and his stupid Kuriboh mask. That was it. He was leaving parties to Mokuba from now on.

In the distance, he heard faint footsteps. Great. He was going to be arrested for trespassing. There's be a huge scandal. His potential business partners would drop out of negotiations, his inventions would cease to have funding, his next tournament would never come to fruition and his distant dreams of having a school were crushed. For a moment he stood there, not even bothering to try and hide, caught up in the horrible weight of what was going to happen.

"Kaiba-kun?"

He looked up, or rather, turned his head slightly right without raising it. Yugi stood before him (beneath him) holding the Kuriboh mask under his arm like a pet dog.

"Uh… did you mean to come down here to the simulation room?"

"Simulation room?"

"Yeah! Otogi-kun was showing it off earlier. He must have just forgotten to turn it off. " Yugi looked rather red, and his hair was heavily mussed. "The exit is that way," he said, pointing to the glowing green exit sign at the end of the hall.

It was all Kaiba could do to keep from ramming his own face through the wall like a frightened ostrich burying his face in sand.

"I knew that," Kaiba said gruffy. He turned and began walking in that direction, and Yugi followed suit.

"So did you like them?" said Yugi as they began to make their way up the stairs. "They're called Applause, because they're supposed to represent a triumph of genetic engineering!"

"... They're hardly a triumph if they're still purple," Kaiba said.

"But that's kind of what you're all about, right? Reaching for the unreachable! Going where no one's gone before. Innovation! And they're blue, which is also your favorite color, right?"

"My favorite color is green."

"Really? Huh. It's kind of weird. I guess we don't really know too much about each other after all this time." Tell me about it, thought Kaiba to himself.

"So…"said Kaiba as they reached the top of the stairs.

"So?" asked Yugi.

"So why eleven?"

"Oh! So I could wear this!" said Yugi, pointing at his rose. Kaiba breathed a sigh of relief. Good. It wasn't a confession. Yugi was just sending him some flowers he thought were cool. "But also because eleven flowers represent a deep and passionate love."

If Kaiba could have leapt down the stairs without killing himself, he would at that moment have attempted to clear two flights. As it was, he went extremely pale and still, almost as if he'd been frozen.

"B-but it's not a problem or anything! You don't need to respond in any way," Yugi said, his face glowing to the roots. "I just thought… we've known each other so long. I might as well tell you." He stood there a moment, apparently waiting for Kaiba to say something.

Kaiba could not say anything. He tried. He really did try, but his larynx was absolutely refusing to function.

"It was nice to see you again, old rival," said Yugi with a smile. "You should enter a tournament again some time! I'd love to duel you again." With that, he put the Kuriboh mask on and headed off towards the direction of the party. Kaiba stood there at the door, the sounds of the merrymakers washing over him like a wave of white noise.

* * *

Somewhere in Kaiba mansion, hidden in a book, hidden behind a shelf, there is a box. In it is a single blue rose.

The End.


End file.
